Abstract

This study investigates the ideological construction of neoliberal multiculturalism in the National Broadcasting Company's series Outsourced, starring a White male lead that manages a call center in India. We argue that the show advances global capitalism by co-opting multiculturalism to provide moral authority for Western neoliberal capitalism in the context of an inequitable global exchange. Neoliberalism benefits from postracialism by privatizing racism, thereby muting calls for antiracist structural reform. Relying on the ideological interests of neoliberal multiculturalism, Outsourced advances old racial logics by presenting unchallenged stereotypes of Indians and Indian culture and promotes a system of economic exchange that favors the global North while cloaking inequality with the veil of multiculturalism and the advancement of Whiteness as normative.